Power struggle at play over upcoming College Football Playoff format |
Brandon Rink
· · Wednesday, May 28 2025
Everybody in college sports wants to make more money, and that means expansion in the College Football Playoff.
That's about where the agreement ends across a wide swath of the sport and its power players. This will undoubtedly be the second and last 12-team version of the CFP in 2025, which was voted to go to a straight seeding format that will reward the Top 4 ranked teams and still include the Top 5 ranked conference champions at their seeding. A move up four to a 16-team format looks to be another area of some agreement, but not how you get there. The SEC and Big Ten appear to be pitted against the ACC and Big 12 in Power conferences remaining. During an in-person meeting of power conference heavy-hitters on May 15, reps from the ACC and Big 12 presented a 16-team playoff proposal that would reward automatic berths to the five highest-ranked conference champions with 11 at-large spots. Sources tell CBS Sports the ACC and Big 12 prefer the 5+11 format over the one floated by the Big Ten and SEC: a 4-4-2-2-1 format that would reward four automatic-qualifiers for the Big Ten and SEC, two for the ACC and Big 12, one for the highest ranked Group of Six champion and three at-large teams. The Big Ten and SEC's discussions have happened internally and have yet to be socialized formally with the four autonomous conferences or the CFP Management Committee... A source familiar with the playoff discussions said the ACC and Big 12 are "prepared to fight" and will "not lay down." The CFP's executives are expected to meet in person on June 18. Despite what money could be involved, ESPN reported that behind the scenes SEC coaches would be in favor of the 5+11 model and staying at eight conference games. "In the meeting room, sources told ESPN, it appeared that the athletic directors were focused on nine SEC games and a model with four automatic qualifiers. The coaches voiced strongly that they wanted a model with five automatic qualifiers and 11 at-larges, with a preference to stay at an eight-game league schedule. "The coaching perspective hint at potential roadblocks for playoff expansion, as there's sentiment that other leagues wouldn't want the playoff to grow -- especially all the way from 12 to 16 teams -- if the SEC didn't go to a nine-game conference schedule." The SEC's apparent move to have four teams guaranteed has gotten some pushback in columns nationally. The Athletic's Stewart Mandel isn't a fan of the format proposed for the 16-team CFP as well: As The Athletic’s Ralph Russo reported Wednesday, the commissioners have now skipped past 14 teams to 16, still with those slanted automatic berths. And not even a clean, simple bracket where No. 1 plays No. 16, No. 2 plays No. 15, etc. “More likely, the CFP would look to start a week earlier, on what has traditionally been Army-Navy weekend,” writes Russo, “with the four lowest seeds (13 through 16) playing their way into the second weekend’s six-game bracket.” Only in college football, where conference commissioners who serve at the behest of their league’s members also get to craft the postseason for the entire sport, could people muck up a perfectly good product this badly. It took a full season for the public to figure out how the first 12-team CFP worked. The format will change again in Year 2 with this week’s (smart) move to a straight seeding model this fall rather than reserving the top four seeds for conference champions. And now they’re talking about changing it even more drastically, a year after that... Those conferences will justify their rationale by citing historical data that says their current members would have averaged even more than four bids annually. They’re not wrong about that. Which is why putting it in writing is unnecessary. I can’t emphasize enough how much damage a predetermined, nonsensical bracket will cause for not just the CFP’s credibility, but college football’s popularity. It will not bring in new fans and it will turn off many current ones. Not to mention, it will likely incur scrutiny from politicians and antitrust lawyers alarmed to see two conferences colluding to rig a national tournament in their favor. CBS Sports' Tom Fornelli took issue with the strength of schedule argument that Sankey is using to prop up his league: "It's clear that not losing becomes in many ways more important than beating the University of Georgia, which two of our teams that were left out did," he said in reference to the belief that strength of schedule was not taken into consideration when choosing last year's playoff field. That's why three three-loss SEC teams, Alabama, Ole Miss, and South Carolina, were left out for programs simply unworthy of being considered great, like Indiana and SMU. Since I respect your time and my dwindling sanity, I will not write 2,500 words on the idea that losing shouldn't matter in competition. Here I thought winning and losing was the soul of sport! Anyway, Sankey is not incorrect in the sense that strength of schedule should matter, which is his greater point. It definitely should. Where he's off-base is that it did matter. It just didn't matter more than winning games, or, more pertinent to the cases of Alabama and Ole Miss, not losing to mediocre teams. While Sankey is happy to mention Alabama and Ole Miss beat Georgia, for some reason he left out that two of Alabama's three regular season losses came to Vanderbilt and Oklahoma. Those two went a combined 3-11 in SEC games not against Alabama. Then there's Ole Miss, which also beat Georgia, but do you remember what it did in its next game? It lost to Florida, but that's not overly embarrassing. The Gators did finish 8-5 and went 3-4 in SEC games not against Ole Miss. No, what's embarrassing was Ole Miss' 20-17 loss at home to Kentucky. It was Kentucky's only SEC win of the year. Its other seven games were all losses and by an average of 14.6 points at that... Sankey and the SEC can push the idea strength of schedule was ignored by the committee, but there's no truth to it. At the end of the day, Alabama and Ole Miss were left out because they lost to four SEC teams that went a combined 6-22 against everybody else in the SEC. South Carolina missed out because head-to-head matters, too. SEC officials are saying an increased CFP will bring more teams into the hunt and drive interest, but SI's Pat Forde argues that it will water things down: In this regard, the integrity and competitiveness of the regular season is in the eye of the beholder. As Castiglione states, more teams (and their fan bases) are in the mix longer. But at some point of diminishing returns, maintaining the ardor of the sixth-place fan base might not be worth the trade-off of producing effort-optional games late in the season for more serious title contenders who are largely assured of a top-four bid. Prolonging fan interest for some programs could lead to waning fan interest for others. Moving to 16 teams and creating made-for-TV play-in games would diminish drama at the top of the food chain. It would smack of gimmickry. And it would be based on a fundamentally flawed premise: that there are multiple automatic bids to be had for some conferences—two in particular—that have declared themselves more equal than others. Another expanded CFP outlook with four guaranteed bids for a league like the SEC in play-in games where the top two make the CFP and then there are play-in games that could pit No. 3 vs. No. 6 and No. 4 vs. No. 5. Another proposal would be an eight-team tournament. Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian seemed to advocate for the status quo of the conference championship game being the centerpiece ahead of the CFP: “It means something to win an SEC championship, and anybody that tells you it’s diminished, they’re lying,” Sarkisian said Tuesday at SEC spring meetings. “It means a lot in our building and I’m sure in everybody else’s building.”... “Everybody wants more teams, everybody wants more games, TV wants more games, I get all that,” Sarkisian said. “But let’s not lose sight of some of those things that we got into this sport for a long time ago, that still mean a lot, to a lot of us.” A CFP format has to be established by Dec. 1.
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